Kirk Sweetsir tips the wings of the plane, waving good-bye, bush pilot style. Heimo and I wave back and wait until the plane has disappeared and we can only hear the far-off buzz of the Cessna 180 engine.
Heimo turns to me, sniffing at the air. “You smell like town,” he says.
“And you look like a ski bunny,” I say, retaliating. Heimo has shaved off his winter beard, though he still wears his sideburns long in modified muttonchops, and his face is now deeply tanned as if he’s spent the two and a half months since I last saw him skiing the slopes of Aspen. “You’ll look the same way when you leave here,” he says. “Tan from the neck up with rings around your eyes from your sunglasses. You did bring a pair, didn’t you? You’re gonna need ’em.”
I look around. The land is luminously white, and I can’t imagine how it can ever be spring. A month past the vernal equinox, and the temperature is still 5 below. The black spruce labor under the weight of snow and the frosted willows tremble in the raw breeze, producing a strange musical sound, like a jazz drummer lightly brushing his snare drum. We are still in the grips of winter, but the shadows are gone. The polar world has tilted toward light—for the last month, the Korths have been gaining more than ten minutes of sunlight each day—and the sun is shining as if it is another season. I lift my face to it. Though it offers little warmth, it is dazzling, and I have to shade my eyes.
The sound of Kirk’s plane trails off into nothing.
In the last half century, the bush plane has dramatically changed the Alaskan landscape, unlocking the door to a wilderness whose sheer breadth would otherwise be unapproachable. Cubs, single-engine Otters, Beavers, and tail-dragging Cessnas like Kirk’s, fifty-year-old planes that have been rebuilt by resourceful pilots, are standard fare in the Alaskan bush. By some accounts, these “flying coffins,” as Alaskans with a flair for black comedy call the bush planes, have been a gift to those eager to experience Alaska. By others, the bush plane has been a great spoiler, rendering areas that were nearly unreachable within the grasp of anyone with a pilot’s license or any Tom, Dick, Harry, Susan, or Jane with enough money to hire one. The prevalence of planes in the bush is sometimes alarming, particularly during the summer backpacking, floating, and big-game hunting seasons, when pilots take advantage of the midnight sun and hustle like big-city cab drivers, running clients to and from the farthest points on the map.
The plane has been a mixed blessing for the Korths. Sounding like Daniel Boone, who moved with his family from western Virginia to Missouri because he needed “elbow room,” Heimo says, “The Old Crow cabin is unreachable by water and almost impossible to get to by land, which is just the way I want it.” The plane, in other words, has made their life in the bush possible. It allows them their isolation. It is also their connection to the world outside. Friends who own planes bring in supplies, food, and mail, and shuttle the Korths from one cabin to another in spring and from the bush to Fort Yukon and back again every summer. Without the help of good friends, the Korths would be hard-pressed to live the way they do. On the other hand, the plane also poses a threat to their lifestyle, allowing hunters, backpackers, and river floaters access to Alaska’s most remote wilderness areas, including the Coleen River and the Old Crow drainage.
“That’s Bear Mountain,” Heimo says, slipping on his sunglasses and pointing north at a massive peak. “And way over there,” he continues, gesturing to the southeast, “those are what we named the Strangle-woman Mountains.” The scene is that of a minimalist painting: the mountains, snow-covered and white, set starkly against a robin’s-egg-blue sky, the peregrinations of the icy Coleen River outlined by the dark trunks of tall white spruce trees.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, putting on my own sunglasses. “Yeah,” Heimo agrees. “I love it here at the upper cabin, especially in spring.”
Heimo and Edna have been “springing out” at one of their three cabins ever since they were married, twenty years ago. “Springing out” is an old-time bush term meaning to spend spring in the bush all the way until after breakup and only then to head for town. Rhonda and Krin have been “springing out” all their lives. They know nothing else.
Spring is a joyous time in the bush, but waiting for breakup can be tough psychologically. There’s a sense of eagerness, an anticipation that builds, that begins to weigh on a person. Everybody is excited to get to town and wonders when breakup will come. When the timing is perfect, breakup happens around mid-May, a week or two after the songbirds and ducks and geese have appeared. However, sometimes breakup is late; it can stretch into early June. When that happens, even the most stable psyches are challenged.
When the Korths leave their cabin for town, they head to Fort Yukon. They’ve been going there for six weeks of “town life” every summer, replicating the historic movement of families out of the woods. Town was always part of the cycle of bush life. Fred Thomas, Heimo’s good friend and the traveling companion of Edward Hoagland in his story “Up the Black to the Chalkyitsik,” recalls, “Families came out in early June to sell their furs, to visit friends, and to stock up on supplies. Sometimes the men would hire themselves out for summer labor. Then in August, they’d load up their boats and head back up the rivers for home.”
We load my gear into the sled, but before going upriver, Heimo quizzes me. “Can you figure out where the Old Crow cabin is?” he asks. I don’t balk. Instead I point confidently in the direction of some rounded, glacial hills, feeling like Heimo’s sister Angie might have when she tried to name tracks in the woods near their childhood home. “Over there,” I say. Heimo follows my outstretched finger, roughly northeast. “Not bad,” he replies, moving my arm six inches to the north, like a piano teacher readjusting a student’s hands. “Twenty miles that way,” he says.
We pull up to the cabin, and I admire Heimo’s woodpile. He’s already cut, split, and stacked nine cords of spruce wood for the following winter. “I was hoping that you left some of that work for me,” I tell him, and then I bound to the door and stomp my feet—remembering my winter lesson—to announce that I am coming in.
Inside the cabin, the girls are hard at work finishing up their studies for the day. Rhonda is clutching her pencil and staring at a long algebra equation, and Krin is working on her spelling. “Meteorology,” I hear her say as I walk in. Edna is sitting in front of the cabin’s only window tending her plants—an apple, a pear tree, and watermelon seeds. She’s placed the plants and seeds in a large plastic bowl filled with dirt. Next to the bowl is an avocado pit soaking in a glass jar half full of water.
Edna rises and hugs me, and the girls smile mischievously. “Uh-oh,” I say. “What are they up to, Edna?” “You know them,” she answers, looking at the girls, who are giggling over their notebooks. “They’ve been plotting. They have a whole month of pranks in store for you.” “Ah, fresh meat,” I say. “I should have known.”
Heimo walks in and catches the tail end of our conversation. “Jeez,” he says, “you’re not even gonna give him a chance to get settled in, are you?” Rhonda and Krin both drop their pencils and beam. “No way!” they shout. “Don’t worry,” I say to Heimo, who is scowling. “I know what to expect from the Merry Pranksters.” On my winter trip, the girls so tormented me with their practical jokes that I’d taken to calling them the “Merry Pranksters.” This time, by the looks of it, they are determined to outdo themselves.
I walk out to the sled, grab my gear, and lug it to the orange Arctic oven tent, which Heimo has pitched in an opening near the outdoor fire pit about fifty feet from the cabin. There is a sign taped to the tent, decorated in bold black letters: “Welcome to Another Nightmare.” I pull the sign from the tent and turn to see who is watching me. Rhonda and Krin dive through the cabin door, and Edna jumps back from the cabin window. I set down my bags to unzip the tent’s rain fly and I realize that I can’t find the zipper. For a moment I am puzzled. Have I forgotten how to get into the tent, my home away from home? Then I realize—another prank. I walk around the tent and discover that the girls have rearranged the rain fly so that its door is at the back. I unclip it and twist it to the front.
I enter the tent warily. What next? Before I know it, I am tangled in something. I throw open the tent door and rain fly to let the light in, and then I know. The girls have strung a spider’s web of invisible nylon thread throughout the tent. It is wound around my neck and arms and legs. I can hear wild laughter coming from the cabin. I have fallen into their trap like an unsuspecting marten, and the girls are cackling loud enough for me to hear.
Before heading back to the cabin for dinner, I set up my cot and stove, slip in my stovepipe, and notice that the girls have stuffed it with tinfoil. It is a fortunate discovery. A clogged stovepipe would have smoked me out five minutes after I started the fire. It isn’t dangerous, but it would have made things uncomfortable on my first night back in the bush since late January. Fishing the tinfoil out of the pipe, I imagine the girls’ glee had the prank succeeded—me retiring to my tent for the night and then rushing out, coughing and cursing and barefoot, into the subzero temperatures and a foot of snow.
“Heimo, Edna,” I say, kicking the snow from my boots before ducking into the doorway “Your girls are a bunch of incorrigible mischief makers.” Krin sweeps the cabin floor, and Rhonda is getting the plates and silverware ready for supper. Both answer in unison with mock innocence, “Who, us?” They are listening to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, their favorite tape, so they reply in their best English accents. “Yes, you,” I say. “Mischief makers, just like their father,” Edna interjects. “That’s where they get it.”
“Shhh,” Heimo says. “I want to hear this.” He turns up the sound on the tape player, and he and Rhonda and Krin anticipate Dr. Watson’s next line: “In those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted …”
Edna announces that the food will be a little late—lentils with caribou hocks and beaver tail—so I take a seat on a bucket near the door and listen along to The Hound of the Baskervilles. The beaver tail is lying on the woodstove.
While we wait for the lentils and the beaver tail, I look around the cabin. Heimo had told me its dimensions, fourteen feet by fourteen feet. It is four feet wider than the Old Crow cabin and only two feet shorter, but for some reason it looks considerably smaller, perhaps because it is even more cluttered, though the clutter is tasteful. In many ways, the Korths consider this, their upper Coleen cabin, to be their home cabin, and Edna has decorated with that in mind. Edna, not Heimo, has built three attractive tables and a corner shelf unit, using slender spruce logs with the bark still attached. The corner shelf contains books, photographs, tapes, and knickknacks, and on one of the tables, she has built a rack to store spices. In the kitchen area, she’s hung colorful wallpaper, depicting fruits and flowers. Above the wallpaper, using plastic milk crates, she’s erected shelves for the plates, dishes, bowls, cups, and utensils. She’s decorated the log walls with shelves, too, and family photographs, and the girls’ drawings. Edna notices me admiring the drawings from my side of the cabin and takes them down. “Here,” she says, handing them to me. “What do you think?”
The girls, I know, love to draw, but on my first visit they were reluctant to let me see any of their work. Edna tried to show me some of it, but when they caught her, they invariably grabbed it away from her and hid it. Maybe now they are more comfortable with me, or perhaps they’re too preoccupied to notice. In any case, neither of them object. On one sheet of paper, Krin has drawn a horned puffin and managed to capture the large, odd-shaped bill. On another, she’s drawn a raven, large and black, and she’s endowed it with something of the raven’s roguishness. Rhonda has drawn a picture of an angelic-looking child, black hair, round face, full lips. She catches me looking at it, but rather than demanding it back, she hands me a photograph. “That’s Krin when she was little,” she says. “I tried to copy it.”
“They’re good artists, aren’t they?” Edna asks. “Like their mother,” I reply. On my first trip, Edna made a pair of Eskimo slippers for my four-year-old daughter, using moose and caribou hide the color of walnut, spiky, short-haired strips of sealskin, and small pieces of lynx and wolf fur, both a mottled gray. On the top of the shoes, she added a white background of beadwork accented by intricately beaded red, yellow, and blue flowers. The slippers were works of art.
The thick reptilelike skin of the twelve-inch beaver tail is bubbling on the woodstove. Heimo rises from a camping chair and peels the skin off the tail with a fork, revealing a semi solid slab of fat. “You’re gonna try it when it’s done, aren’t you?” Heimo asks, challenging me. He holds the tail suspended over a plate. Large drops of fat fall from it like juice from an orange that’s been cut in half. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say, and grimace. “It’s rich,” Heimo warns. “I wouldn’t eat too much of it or you’ll be awful sick.” Then he adds, “The PETA people would love the image of you eating beaver tail. I’m a member of PETA, you know. People for the Eating of Tasty Animals, that is.”
Then he wraps the tail in tinfoil and sets it back on the stove. Twenty minutes later, Edna peels the foil back, peeks at the tail, and pokes at it gingerly with a fork. “Done,” she says. “Turn off that tape. Dinner’s ready.”
Heimo hands me a large bowl of green lentils, which includes a sizeable bone, and a piece of beaver tail about the size of a hamburger patty. I try the beaver tail first, and they all watch and wait for my reaction. It is richer than anything I have ever eaten. It tastes like the drippings of southern fried chicken. Imagine removing the chicken from a cast-iron skillet and using a fork to scrape off what remains—skin, fat, and Crisco. Dip the fork in a bowl of melted butter, and you have beaver tail. “So, what do you think?” Heimo asks enthusiastically. “Just wait until we have pickled beaver’s feet.” At that, he grabs the two feet from a bowl and holds them for me to see. They look as big as diving fins. “We boil them and then we pickle them in onion and vinegar. They’re delicious.”
I finish my lentils and ask for a second helping. Though I’ve enjoyed the beaver tail, I’ve had enough. It is now sitting in my stomach like a giant sponge. “There’s lots,” Heimo says, ladling lentils into my bowl. “Eat more.” “Stop,” I say, slowly pulling my bowl away so he doesn’t dump a ladleful onto the floor. I knew better than to listen to Heimo. I’ve never witnessed anyone with such an insatiable appetite. He burns a lot of calories, that is true, but there is no accounting for his ability to eat. Heimo eats like a wolf, bingeing when he can, as if preparing himself for a time of scarcity. Next to him, I look like a child playing with his food.
I finish my meal first and then I watch as Heimo and Krin clean their caribou bones, using their jackknives to trim away the gristle and cartilage. Though I am loath to waste food, I look prodigal next to them. It’s a basic rule up here: You can use God’s name in vain when the snow has destroyed your trail or a lynx has stolen a marten from your poleset or the mosquitoes are murderous or it’s so goddamn cold that you don’t want to leave the cabin. But it’s sinful to waste anything, especially food.
When Heimo and Krin finish with their jackknives, they gnaw on the bones as if they might never again see another meal, as if the ducks and geese on which they depend for spring food have ceased their spring migration to the Arctic nesting grounds. Finally, they dig their knife blades into the bones to winnow out the marrow. “I love the marrow,” Heimo says. Then he looks at me. “You eat like a white man. We eat like Natives. You leave the best parts. Natives would never do that. They utilize the whole animal.”
“Give me back my bone,” I say, knowing that Rhonda has already cleared my plate.
When Heimo finally finishes his bone, he plops it onto his plate, and it looks as if it has been bleached by the sun and then polished. There isn’t a scrap of cartilage remaining. Rhonda, who is cleaning up the dishes, takes the bone and ducks out the cabin door. Then she winds up and tosses it into the bushes thirty feet from the cabin.
She pokes her head in through the door, smiling at me.
“Your bone’s out there, too, if you still want it.”
Next day, we have a lunch of Edna’s sourdough bread and honey—early white trappers and miners regarded sourdough as one of their most prized possessions, hence the epithet “sourdough” to describe someone who makes his living in the bush. Then Heimo helps me collect water at the spring behind the cabin. This morning I woke up with stomach pains and promptly reconsidered my decision to drink the water right out of the Coleen, as the Korths do, because the river has beaver. Heimo has taken four beaver this spring, but he left a family and a few others— “seed,” he calls them—as breeding stock for next year. I am determined now to use the spring to guard against giardia, sometimes called “beaver fever.” Giardias are parasitic protozoans that live in beaver feces—though all mammals can be infected—and are transmitted through unfiltered water. Though the Korths sometimes use the spring, they prefer the water in the river and seem to have built up a resistance to the parasite based on a long-term, low-level exposure. In fact, according to a Fairbanks parasitologist, they could probably drink heavily contaminated water now without becoming infected. I, on the other hand, have no such resistance, and I’ve heard enough giardia horror stories—intestinal pain, cramping, diarrhea—to feel sufficiently chastened. The last thing I want to do is spend my spring trip running to and from the outhouse.
What passes for an outhouse at the upper Coleen cabin is nothing more than a three-foot hole in the ground over which Heimo has erected a kind of toilet. The toilet has four legs like a table. Where the top should be, Heimo has built a sort of seat, nothing more than a V formed by two pieces of wood with the open end of the V facing forward. It is primitive, but it works, though each and every time I visit I wonder just how the contraption will withstand my 225-pound frame. Last winter, Heimo told me the story of a fledgling Fort Yukon trapper who once fell into an outhouse hole and forever after was known by the name of “Shitslinger,” and I am not eager to see just how creative Heimo, Edna, and the girls can be in the event that I take a similar spill. One good thing about the outhouse is that it has a degree of privacy. In preparation for my visit—more to ensure the privacy of Edna and the girls—Heimo tied up a large green plastic tarp in front of the hole. The outhouse is open on three sides, though the side facing the cabin is shielded. In comparison to the Old Crow setup this is practically luxurious. Along the Old Crow, the permafrost—a layer of permanently frozen ground, which farther north in the High Arctic extends nearly 2,000 feet down—is so near the surface that it’s impossible to dig an outhouse hole. The outhouse there was the frozen creek bed. Everyone selected a spot in the snow, squatted, and then covered it up like a cat. Heimo’s reasoning was that when the spring floods came, they would wash away the shit, diluting the presence of human feces in the water, as Heimo said, to something like “parts per billion.” Toilet paper wasn’t discarded. In keeping with the no-waste ethic, Heimo encouraged me to bring it back and use it as firestarter.
On the way to the spring, it occurs to me that I should probably ask Heimo about grizzlies. I should have inquired yesterday, when I arrived, but I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was overly anxious, though it would have been an entirely reasonable question. The Interior abounds with tales of Ursus arctos horribilis, one of the largest carnivores left on the planet. Although grizzlies aren’t really a worry in winter, the most chilling tale I’ve heard concerns the “winter” or “ice” bear, an animal that would sooner eat than sleep. While most bears den up for four to five months to wait out the worst of the weather in a state akin to sleep, where their heart rate drops to as few as eight beats per minute, the ice bear is forced by hunger to leave the comfort of its den and go out in search of food. After emerging from its den, it finds water as quickly as it can and submerges itself in it, forming a thick coat of insulating ice on top of its fur and fat. The ice bear is not only unafraid of the human scent, some people say it is attracted to it. Worst of all, its ice coat makes the bear impervious to bullets. But for all the ferocity of the stories, the ice bear is largely the stuff of legend. Yet once heard, it is as hard to wrest the ice bear from the imagination as it is for a boy or girl to escape night terrors after listening, for the first time, to the ghost story “The Man with the Golden Arm” around a campfire.
Krin and Rhonda are creeping through the trees behind us, like spies. They overhear my question and immediately launch into an impersonation of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “ ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ ” they shout. “ ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ ” They dash behind a makeshift rack containing perhaps a hundred leghold traps and dozens of snares, which Heimo has pulled for the year, and cower as if being charged by an attacking grizzly. Heimo is more serious. “Some of the males are out of their dens by now,” he says, “so you should be careful when walking around, especially upriver. I wouldn’t worry too much about coming back here to the spring, but maybe you should carry a gun just in case.” He pauses. “I’d hate to be the one to deliver the bad news to your wife and mother.” He hoots, not at all reluctant to laugh at his own joke.
I decide right then that I will take a shotgun with me whenever I visit the spring, “just in case.” I had a scare the previous summer while backpacking with a friend, north of here, near the Canadian border, and I am not about to take any chances.
It was morning, and my buddy Burns and I had just finished breakfast. I was repacking my pack while Burns went off into some willows to relieve himself. Minutes later, I saw him coming back. Ten feet from the campsite he suddenly stopped. “What’s going on?” I asked. He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did he nearly whispered—“Turn around.” I turned around slowly, sensing the tension in his voice, and there was a 600-pound, honey-humped boar grizzly fifty yards away, walking right at us. Though my first instinct was to run, I held my ground. There was nowhere to run. There wasn’t a climbable tree within fifty miles.
Six hundred pounds is big, yet the barren-lands grizzly of northern Alaska is only half as large as its coastal bear cousin, which dines on fish aplenty instead of roots, berries, and ground squirrels. Burns and I tried to keep calm and do as we’d been told. We locked arms to look larger and more imposing and started talking to the bear. We didn’t shout, but we spoke loud enough for him to hear, in confident, casual tones. “Howdy, bear,” we said. “We’re right here, big fella. Sorry to be camped out on your creek. Just passin’ through.” But the bear waddled toward us, as if he hadn’t heard a word. “Run if it’s a moose, stand if it’s a bear.” The closer he got, the more the mantra fast-tracked through my head.
The distance was shrinking, forty yards, then thirty. We’d been hoping to see a grizzily—from a safe distance—but this didn’t qualify. There’s something about staring a bear in the face that makes a person immediately aware of his place in the food chain. My heart was pounding as I watched him amble down our side of the creek, seemingly unaware of, or indifferent to, our presence. It was dead calm and there was always the possibility that he hadn’t winded us yet. So I kept talking at him, while Burns grabbed a pot and banged on it with a soupspoon, but still the bear didn’t stop. Finally, as a last resort, I grabbed my pistol, a Ruger .44 Magnum double-action revolver. “Should I shoot one into the air?” I asked Burns. “It might scare him off.” Burns stopped banging on the pot. “Just hold on a moment,” he said.
When the bear was thirty feet away, he crossed to the other side of the four-foot wide creek and stood on his hind legs, sniffing at the air, nostrils quivering, the first sign that he had noticed us, and a good sign, too. If he’d wanted to attack, he would have been slobbering. His ears would have been cocked back, and his head hung low, swinging back and forth. He would have been “woofing,” too. Nevertheless, I could hear him breathe and that was enough to make every nerve ending in my body tingle with a fear-inspired electricity. After a minute or so, he settled back down on all fours. Remembering the words of a hiking guide who made his living taking city folk into the Alaskan wilds, I kept the gun zeroed in on his shoulder anyway. “Break him down,” the guide had told me. “I carry a sawed-off shotgun with slugs when I’m taking clients out. If you’re going to shoot a grizzly with a .44 Magnum, you have to break him down. Go for the shoulders first.” I held the gun as steady as possible, wondering how even a .44 Magnum could damage that magnificently muscular shoulder. All the while, Burns and I kept talking to him. “Just be on your way now, big boy, and we’ll be on ours.”
The grizzly sniffed at the air again, and then he crossed back to our side of the small creek and lazily wandered around us, giving us a wide berth. He was almost gracious about it. Nevertheless, we’d heard enough about the treachery of grizzlies not to be lulled into complacency by his apparent generosity. I kept the gun on him and Burns kept talking. Only when there were one hundred yards between us, and the bear was happily digging for roots in the tundra, did we allow ourselves to think that perhaps we wouldn’t be mauled.
The truth of the matter is that a .44 Magnum offers a false sense of security. A grizzly can move quicker than Warren Sapp on a Sunday afternoon, covering fifteen yards in just over a second. It takes a steady hand and a rapid succession of shots from someone very comfortable with a .44 Magnum to bring down a charging bear. Heimo carries a .44 for protection against bears, but he knows how to handle the gun. He would stand a chance against a rushing, ill-intentioned grizzly; I wouldn’t.
An old trapper was the first to break the news to me about the fecklessness of a .44 Magnum in the hands of someone who isn’t accustomed to shooting one. We’d been talking about bears, and he’d asked me if I’d ever run into a grizzly. Why, sure I had, I told him, just the summer before. He was close, I said. “Were you carrying a gun?” he drawled. “Heck, yeah,” I told him with some bluster. “I was carrying a .44 Magnum.” “Psst,” he said, winking and bending close to me, as if he were ready to share a secret. I was all ears. “Next time you’re carrying that .44 of yours, be sure to file off the sight.” “File off the sight?” I asked him, thoroughly perplexed. “Hell, yeah,” he said, repeating the advice. “File off the sight.” I looked at him, waiting for his words of wisdom. He let the anticipation build. “That way,” he said, drawing in a deep breath, “when a grizzly shoves that gun up your ass, it won’t hurt so goddamn much.”
Still, the most persistent fallacy of Alaska is that there’s a hungry bear hiding in every thicket just waiting to devour you. The truth is that grizzlies in the Interior have a range of one hundred square miles. Unless you know where to find them and what to look for, you’re lucky to spot a pigeon-toed track much less a real bear. Yet the primal fear one feels when hiking in grizzly country persists. A fresh pile of spoor or the sight of an excavated hill where a grizzly has torn up everything to get at roots or a squirrel is sure to raise the hair on the back of the human neck.
Heimo has already been out to wake me—at 6:30 sharp, as he has for the last week. But I’d just put a fresh log in the stove, and I was seduced into sleeping for another hour by the womblike warmth of the tent.
This time it is Krin who appears. Heimo or Edna has sent her out to get me, and she isn’t happy about it. “Breakfast,” she says with a growl. “Wake up.” Then I hear her run off through the snow. The sharp “thump” of the spring-loaded cabin door closing tells me that she is now inside and that it is safe for me to come out and take my morning pee. In winter I kept a plastic jug next to my cot, which I used as a pee bottle to avoid having to go outside. But spring is a whole other story. In spring I look forward to my morning pee and to boring a deep hole into the snowbank behind my tent.
At the cabin door I kick the snow off my feet to something of a Scottish jig rhythm. I perfected the step while on the Old Crow, but since no one has picked up on it, I do it largely for my own amusement.
The others have already eaten their breakfast, but they’ve left behind a large bowl of oatmeal for me. “Oatmeal or no meal,” I say, smothering it in honey and sitting down on a chair, a large tree trunk to which Edna has nailed a comfortable cushion.
Heimo is paging through a book I gave him the previous evening— E. C. Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic. He points to the photo of the walruses on the book’s front cover and makes a hoarse barking sound like a dog with kennel cough. “Ayvuq,” he says. “Walrus. They call walrus ayvuq on St. Lawrence Island.” Edna corrects him. “Au-vuq,” she says, only her pronunciation is more guttural.
“We used to hunt them when I was in Savoonga, continues Heimo. “You had to shoot them six inches behind the eye. It was the only place. The rest was solid blubber. Sometimes we’d hunt them in a fog. We couldn’t see them until we were almost on top of them, but you could hear the cows barking, and you could smell them. God, the stink, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Edna is sitting on their sleeping platform and Heimo is lying in her arms while he tells the story. Even after twenty years of marriage, and enough tragedy to break up any relationship, there is an easy intimacy between them. Edna grabs Heimo’s belly and then rubs it. At forty-seven, Heimo is remarkably fit, so Edna grabs what she can. “More here than there used to be,” she says, teasing him. “Where?” Heimo asks, perhaps wondering if the push-ups and sit-ups he does four times a week are working. “Right here,” Edna responds, latching onto as much skin as she can. “Ouch,” Heimo yelps, and then bends his head back and kisses Edna on the underside of her chin.
The girls are doing freewriting exercises and don’t seem at all distracted by their parents’ antics. “Finished,” Krin says, and hands me her story. Rhonda is still hard at work on hers, twirling her hair with her free hand, concentrating. This is dangerous territory; I am to tell Krin what I think of her writing. Krin, who is at work on a diarylike book called On the Banks of the Coleen, writes of an owl trying to make its way through swirling snow. I read silently. When I’m through with Krin’s story, Rhonda hands me hers. Rhonda writes of walking on a trail through a copse of willows—bear country. Though she has her 30.30 rifle, a gift from Fred Thomas, which she’s carried since she was ten, she is feeling uneasy. Aside from the occasional misspellings and grammatical mistakes, they are both good pieces of writing, detailed and evocative, and I tell them that. If they are pleased by my comments, though, it doesn’t show. Without a word, they take back their stories and continue writing.
In spring, life here on the banks of the Coleen slows down. In winter, it was get up and go and try to get as much done as possible while there was still light. But in spring the light is nearly endless, and the Korths adjust their days to accommodate a new tempo. Trapping is over. Heimo has limited out on beaver. Though the wolf season is still open, their pelts are so mangy that Heimo is content to let them be. Most mornings, we just sit around and casually, or not so casually, visit.
The girls call Heimo “The Reverend” because of his propensity for polemic. I refer to him as “The Puzzle.” He once expressed delight when I called his friend Keith Koontz, the hunting guide, a puzzle, but Heimo embodies many of the same contradictions. He is a gun-toting, park-hating, anti-animal-rights trapper with a soft side. Though he makes his living off the land, hunting and trapping, taking from it, he cares about it deeply. Fran Mauer, a widely respected biologist and a twenty-eight-year veteran of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says, “I admire Heimo’s relationship to the land. He’s very respectful of the land and the lifestyle. He’s matured and he’s deepened since he first came into the country.” Don Ross, former assistant manager of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and pilot for the Refuge, concurs with Mauer. “Heimo’s the only full-time trapper left in the refuge who’s still living off the land. Most of the others have fallen by the wayside. He traps sustainably, and he has great regard for the land. I appreciate his love for the place and a lifestyle that is vanishing.”
Except for his family, the land is the thing Heimo loves the most, and he translates that love into a knowledge of the natural world that is nothing short of astounding. Though Heimo never made it through high school while he was in Appleton, during his first year on the Coleen River, he decided that a diploma was something important to him. He studied at night, after checking his lines, and completed his diploma through the high school in Fort Yukon in May 1980. His grammar is still often rough and unpolished, but what he lacks in such skills, he more than makes up for with his knowledge of the Arctic. He could teach a college course in Arctic ecology or natural history. As for his family, he hugs and kisses his girls and tells them he loves them at least a dozen times a day. “My mom loved us up,” he says, “and I try to do the same with Rhonda and Krin.” Like many teenagers, they sometimes bristle at his affection, but more often than not, they return his tendernesses—an unexpected hug, a kiss on the cheek before bed.
Although Heimo has been called a pioneer, he strenuously rejects the notion. He does not see himself as the advance guard of a civilization certain of its own righteousness. He is not committed to inspiring acolytes or finding a new route to the Promised Land, either. Nor is he an evangelical proponent of some life-changing back-to-nature doctrine— to hell with spreading the gospel. He has no interest in reviving America’s moribund frontier spirit. In fact, the fewer people he sees out in the country, the better, though if you push him he’ll admit that there’s some power in numbers; in other words, he wishes there were a few more trappers helping him to carry on the wilderness tradition, albeit at a safe hundred-mile distance. His is not an ascetic experiment, either. Though he has been living in the remote bush for almost three decades, he was alone for only six of them, and those six years were enough. Six years alone in the Alaskan bush will undo almost any man. “The mind needs people,” Heimo says. “I craved people. Nobody’s a wolverine. A wolverine is a strict loner.”
In the mornings, lingering after breakfast, Heimo rails against waste, excess, consumerism, comfort, and the softness of American society like a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist reformer, yet he has little patience with the movement itself. Cambridge-educated bush pilot Kirk Sweetsir understands Heimo’s distaste for environmentalists and a brand of environmentalism that doesn’t appreciate his presence on the land. “They are all too blatant about their bourgeois intellectual tourism, and it is just too trivializing of his world for Heimo to stomach them,” he says.
Heimo believes that environmentalists (and Democrats, too) are out to eradicate his way of life. They’re antiguns and antitrapping. He calls most environmentalist do-gooders “greenies,” practically spitting the word, though he and the environmental movement have more in common than he’d like to admit—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for one. Heimo does not want it developed under any circumstances, and he is emphatic in his defense. With the impending state budget crisis (Alaska’s Constitutional Budget Reserve, a $1.9 billion savings, will be exhausted by 2004), his is an unpopular opinion in Alaska these days. Oil royalties mean money for the state. Oil’s enthusiastic champion is Frank Murkowski, Alaska’s former prodevelopment senator and now its newly elected governor. In his State of the State address, Murkowski made it clear how he intends to solve Alaska’s impending budget debacle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in his address in Juneau on January 23, 2003, “in a single word, it’s oil.” Meanwhile pro-oil legislators are seeking to exempt pipeline permits from court challenges initiated by environmental groups and authorized under the National Environmental Protection Act.
Oil, it seems, is the only answer in Alaska. Although the cupboard is nearly bare, Governor Murkowski and most of the state’s oil advocates refuse to discuss an income tax as a possible solution to the imminent deficit pinch. Taxes are for liberal Eastern states like Connecticut and “Taxachusetts,” but not for Alaska. Some suggest that this attitude reflects a crude and suspect form of frontierism, a deal sealed with the “Alaskan handshake,” hand held out and palm turned upward—taxes bad, oil extraction good. Reading Donald Worster, who is an environmental historian critical of the United States’s exploitative history, one might be tempted to draw comparisons between Worster’s arid West and Alaska today. Worster writes: “The hydraulic society of the West is … increasingly a coersive, monolithic, and heirarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.” Worster points out that despite the West’s image as a region of hardy, antigovernment individualists, corporate control of water actually has subverted, and continues to jeopardize, small-scale democracy and individual freedom. The same might be said of Alaska today, where a rhetoric of frontier individualism often bumps up against an economic reality of ongoing and monumental fiscal shortfalls (nearly $1 billion in 2002). Since 80 percent of the state’s revenues come from taxes and royalties on oil and gas—Anchorage Daily News columnist Mike Doogan jokes that “There’s nothing more Alaskan than having an eye for a fast buck”—it’s probably safe to assume that despite the regulation of the industry, big oil wields a corresponding influence over Alaska’s internal affairs.
Edna leans back to turn on the radio for the morning weather report, but the radio responds with nothing but static. “Shut that thing off,” Heimo grumbles. Heimo is mad—they haven’t been able to get a clear message for nearly a month. Actually, what he’s really ticked off about is that the station has decided to drop its report for the southern foothills of the eastern Brooks Range—upper Coleen River country.
Heimo’s anger passes quickly, and then he nuzzles his face against Edna’s cheek. Edna shrieks. “You need a shave,” she says, pushing him away. “Do that again, and you’ll be sleeping in the cache tonight.”
Sending Heimo to the cache for the night is Edna’s favorite threat. Wives in the Lower Forty-eight might threaten their husbands with an evening in the doghouse, but that has little currency up here. The cache is a threat Edna can make good on since the Korths have two of them.
The cache—French for “hiding place”—is a fixture in the Alaskan bush, where animals, particularly marauding bears, can threaten anything within reach. The Korths store everything they don’t want torn apart or eaten—the canoe, food supplies, decoys, skis, snowshoes, clothes, etc.—in the cache. The cache is a freestanding tree-fortlike structure built on four sturdy spruce legs. The Korths have built wooden ladders to each of their two caches under the assumption that even surprisingly agile and intelligent grizzlies can’t climb ladders. One cache is open-air and two-tiered with coffee cans wrapped around its legs to discourage squirrels and marten. The top tier is nearly twenty-five feet off the ground. The other cache is built like a fortress with thick log walls. It stands about fifteen feet off the ground. An animal would have to be plenty smart to get inside.
“Whose turn is it to do the dishes?” Edna asks. Krin responds immediately, “It’s Rhonda’s. I did them last night.” “Heck you did,” Rhonda replies. “I did.” The girls bicker, and finally Edna settles the matter. “Krin, you’ll get the water, and Rhonda, you’ll do the dishes.” Rhonda grumbles.
Fighting over who is going to do the dishes is a scene that takes place almost on a daily basis. I could set my watch by it. The girls are best of friends, but when it comes time to do the dishes, they are ready to do battle. It doesn’t make sense to me, since hauling the water seems the harder of the two jobs, but the girls fight about it as if doing the dishes were the worst of all possible fates.
Heimo asks me to escort Krin to the river. “Take my shotgun,” he says. Heimo spotted fresh bear tracks two days ago on the island that separates the river’s two channels, and he’s not taking any chances. He hands me the gun and four shells, two slugs and two buckshot.
Unlike the creek at the Old Crow cabin, the Coleen doesn’t freeze to the bottom, so getting water is hard work, but not the undertaking it was on the Old Crow. The water hole is a quarter-mile walk upriver to where Heimo has chopped an opening in the ice. The current rushes below, occasionally slopping over the edges of the hole. Staring down at the river, I realize just how indifferent the natural world is to our presence. If the ice were to break, I’d be gone in a second, swept a hundred miles downriver to where the Coleen dumps into the Porcupine River—“kissin’ the ice from the bottom side,” I’ve heard it called. Not a pleasant thought, but nothing to obsess over either, though the danger is real, particularly as breakup approaches and the ice is getting thinner and weaker.
Krin finishes tying her shoe and joins me at the hole. “It’s safe,” I say, to which she says nothing. Krin and Rhonda are sometimes a puzzling pair. With me they are alternately mischievous and sweet, guarded, unfriendly, and sullen. Their inconsistency is what gets to me, since their moods seem to have almost nothing to do with my behavior. Sometimes it’s simply my being here that seems to bother them. I try to put their attitudes into perspective. I am an outsider—they see very few visitors—and as far as they’re concerned I am the biggest rube ever plopped down in the Arctic. I invade their lives for a month at a time and then subject them to my ineptitude, photographs, and meddlesome questions.
Krin kneels beside the hole and dips the five-gallon bucket into the river. Then she gets to her feet and struggles to lift the bucket to her shoulder. At five-feet nine inches, she really has to hoist it. “May I help you with that?” I ask her, and she glares at me and starts to walk back to the cabin. “C’mon, Krin,” I say, “let me give you a hand.” “I’m not a weakling,” she replies, and doubles her pace. The last thing she needs is my help.
“Five more to go,” Heimo says. “This is number seventy-nine.” Heimo gestures toward a pile of spruce poles. There are eighty-four of them in all—Heimo has numbered them—trunks of dead trees, which Heimo cut down and hauled to the river before I arrived. The cabin’s pole roof is eighteen years old, and Heimo’s intention is to replace it with these new poles.
For the last three days, Heimo and I have been using a drawknife to peel the bark off the poles, because bark makes the inside of a cabin look like a dark cellar, and because it contributes to rot, and Heimo wants a roof that will last at least another eighteen years, preferably more. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “Edna and I will grow old out here, and then when it comes time, she and the girls can scatter my ashes over the upper Coleen.” Peeling poles is not exactly grueling work, but it takes time and requires some arm strength. Alone Heimo can do ten a day. Together we’ve almost doubled that. Heimo does the ends of the poles, which require some finesse, and I do the rest.
I am standing in a pile of peelings, straddling one of the poles, working on a knot, and cursing it for resisting my attempts to shave it. “Hold on,” Heimo says, and chips it out using the ax. “Now, go over it again with the knife.” Getting every bur is essential to ensuring a waterproof roof, since one of the roof’s four layers will be a sheet of Visqueen. A hole in the Visqueen spells trouble once the mid-August rains arrive. In other words, you can’t be careful enough.
Though it is May 6, the temperature last night dropped to 15 below. I lay awake in my tent listening to the river ice snap in the cold like the sharp crack of a small-caliber rifle. Sometimes the ice sounded like a chorus of crickets. But now, at the river, in the early afternoon, the sun spills everywhere, and the temperature has risen to the low forties, and the ice is silent though slushy.
I am working in a long-sleeved micro fleece shirt, and I am dripping sweat. Perched on a tree beside us, Heimo has a small tape player with a bird tape in it. He’s preparing for the spring songbird migration. He listens to the bird’s song and before the man on the tape identifies it, Heimo announces its name: “ruby-crowned kinglet, varied thrush, American robin, rusty blackbird, Bohemian waxwing, dark-eyed junco, American wigeon, red-necked grebe, trumpeter swan.” Heimo doesn’t miss a song. “I like birding more than just about anything.”
For nearly the last week, Heimo, Edna, and the girls, who have inherited their father’s love of ornithology, have been awaiting the return of spring’s birds. They have been watching the sky, listening for the faintest song, but spring has been slow to progress and the winter birds are all we see and hear—boreal chickadees, gray jays, pine grosbeaks.
In spring, when the snow in the cabin yard still registers eight inches on the snow stick and nighttime temperatures still fall below 0, life on the Coleen River can take on a quality resembling drudgery. The Korths have had enough of the cold and the snow. So they wait moodily for the announcement of winter’s end, for the first signs of spring: the golden eagles followed by snow buntings, and then the ruby-crowned kinglets; hatches of caddis flies and mosquitoes on which the birds depend for food; willow buds, which show up like small miracles of color among the shrub’s bare, nearly white branches; a hint of overflow coming down from Bear Mountain; the first patches of open ground. Then suddenly, spring snaps, the dramatic quickening begins, and it seems as if the entire bird world is following the Coleen River corridor north. The ice moves out with a great roaring. The river carves out new channels at will, defying the land to hold it back. Trees are torn from their roots as if they were nothing more than weeds.
“I can hardly wait,” Heimo says as I put the finishing touches on our second-to-last pole. I know enough now not to ask what he’s waiting for; in fact, I have the spring bug myself. “C’mon, spring,” I say, tossing the finished pole onto the pile. Just then, I catch Krin out of the corner of my eye doing a flying leap from the river’s bank down onto the pile of spruce shavings. And it’s no mere hop. It’s a jump of at least six feet. She lands on her feet, stumbles a little, but doesn’t fall. Heimo just shakes his head. “Don’t you have schoolwork?” he asks. Krin ignores him. She picks a young willow bud and chews it and then skates out onto the ice in her boots. “I’ve got cabin fever,” she finally replies, skating back to us. “You always have cabin fever,” Heimo says, dropping the drawknife, and wrapping his arms around her. “My crazy Krin.” “Tigger,” I correct him quietly, but Krin hears and scowls at me.
I call Krin “Tigger,” though rarely to her face, because at thirteen she imagines herself too old for affectionate nicknames. Like Tigger, Krin bounces wherever she goes, and she’s utterly fearless about it. If she’s been splitting wood and wants to go into the cabin, she doesn’t walk around the pile; she’s tall for her age, so she backs up, gets a running start, and leaps over, stretching her athletic five-foot nine-inch frame as far as it will go. If she’s going to get something out of the high cache and encounters a fallen tree, she simply jumps it. If she goes to church in Fort Yukon during the summer, she arrives fifteen minutes late in order to make what she calls a “grand entrance,” and then bounds down the aisle to the front pew, sitting as far from Edna and Rhonda as she can get.
Heimo peels the ends of our last pole. “I’ll be glad to have this over with,” he says. “Why don’t I just finish this one?” I don’t object. Instead I walk back to the cabin to get a box for the shavings. They’ll be good fire starters for my stove. At the cabin yard, Rhonda is sitting on a bench outside, taking a break from her studies. She points to a hawk owl, clinging to the top branch of a nearby white spruce. “He’s a curious fella,” she says. “He’s been watching me.” Then she gets up and walks over to a small spruce tree and scrapes off some pitch with her index finger. She sits back down next to me and shows me a small cut on the top of her hand, near her thumb. “I did it with the bow saw,” she says, rubbing the pitch into the cut. “I thought I heard a Bohemian waxwing and I got excited. It doesn’t hurt too bad though. Serves me right. I wasn’t paying attention because I was thinking about running to the cabin to get Mom. Bohemian waxwings are a sure sign of spring. If I saw a Bohemian waxwing we wouldn’t be out here much longer. We’d be getting off the river, for sure.”
* * *
Everyone is getting antsy. For days I’ve watched the girls walk in and out of the cabin ten times an hour, unable to concentrate on their studies. They’re supposed to do four to five hours of work a day, but the year is winding down. Rhonda is sick of algebra. Krin just wants the birds to come.
Rhonda and Krin are part of the Alaska Gateway Correspondence School out of Tok, Alaska. Every year, just before they leave Fort Yukon for the bush, they are sent a year’s supply of study materials. They’re required by the state to take the basic subjects: writing, math, U.S. history and government, and science. They’re able to send out their work with the occasional pilot, who, in turn, sends it to Tok. The lessons are graded by their correspondence teacher and then mailed to Fort Yukon. Sometimes a pilot will pick up the Korths’ mail and bring it out for them. They get months of mail at a time. The girls then have a chance to look over their many graded lessons. It’s a difficult way to learn. They have no direct contact with their teacher. Although they are naturally bright, verbal, and inquisitive, I cannot help but think that their education occasionally suffers from this arrangement, particularly as they get older and the lessons get tougher, too hard for either Heimo or Edna to lend any appreciable help.
Even Edna needs a break. All year long she’s tried to guide the girls’ studies as best she can, given her own limited education; she never finished high school. She’s struggled with many of the lessons herself. But this time of year, like the girls, she just wants it all to be over. The Korths have been in the bush since July, and Edna is eager to get to Fort Yukon, where she has a summer flower garden and a handful of close friends. “Occasionally a pilot will pay us a visit out here,” she says. “But they’re always men. They’re nice, but they talk to Heimo.”
Dawn Jagow, whose family—husband, Paul, and two children—spends part of the year in the bush, understands Edna’s sentiments. “I know how hard it must be for her. On the river, we get visitors, but they’re almost always men, too. I make tea and back off most of the time. For a woman the hardest part is not having anyone to share your feelings with. It really becomes apparent to me when we come to town and I realize how much I’ve missed my friends. On the river, I read a lot and I have conversations in my head with my friends. But I’ve never found a substitute for the lack of friends. The bush is very much a man’s world. But it’s my home, and I consider myself lucky to live like this.”
The girls are eager to get to town, too. They want to see their friends, talk about new CDs, watch videos, play computer games, read music magazines, drink Mountain Dews and Cokes, and maybe dye their hair and meet boys. They have big plans for summer, and when they talk about them, it’s difficult for me to remember that they grew up out here rather than in some suburb of Milwaukee or Chicago. Krin used to be a big fan of pop icon Britney Spears, but now she leans toward Pink, Lil Bow Wow, and Lil’ Kim. Rhonda likes to write rap lyrics, incorporating messages of racial tolerance, which, if nothing else, is testament to the power and pervasiveness of the modern media machine. But more than anything else they want friends. They want to grow up like normal kids—“Like Dad did,” Rhonda points out.
Rhonda, Krin, and I are walking one of the river’s many braids looking for bare ground. We are out collecting Indian potato, a carrotlike tuber found along the river’s cutbanks. The girls each carry a pick, our digging tools, and I tote the shotgun. “Just hanging out with people our own age,” Rhonda continues, “it’s something we’ve hardly had a chance to do. It was always get into town and get back out as quickly as we could. A month and a half goes so fast. We’d just get to know people again and it’d be time to come back out to the cabin. Plus, Dad’s so protective of us when we’re in Fort Yukon. He likes us to stay around the cabin, so he can keep an eye on us.
“Why do we live like this?” she continues. “It’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times. There really is no answer; we just do. Daddy and Mom chose to live this way. Daddy loves it, and Mom does too, I think. Besides, Dad’s done it for so long, I don’t know what else he’d want to do, or could do. It’s all he knows now.”
The temperature is in the low 50s today—it hasn’t reached 50 since early September—and Rhonda is wearing an Adidas sweatsuit and a red bandana and would look more like a New York City rapper than a wilderness girl if it weren’t for her hip boots. Catch her in Fort Yukon in June, and it’d be easy to think she’d never spent a day in the bush. I know otherwise. In the last half hour, Rhonda has pointed out to me mink, porcupine, wolverine, and snowshoe hare tracks, and a small pile of fox scat. Both she and Krin have carried knives and matches since they were five. Familiarity with knives and fire-building skills are essential in the bush, and Heimo and Edna reasoned that it was better to teach the girls when they were young, which was a good thing because when she was eight Rhonda was called upon to use them in an emergency.
It was mid-September 1994, and Heimo hadn’t shot a moose yet; in fact, he hadn’t even seen one. Hoping that his luck would change, he and Rhonda, who barely came up to his ribs, set off in the canoe down-river to explore a slough where Heimo had found moose in the past. The weather had turned cold, and ice was beginning to run in the river. They tied off the boat at the mouth of the slough and walked the bank. Heimo stopped occasionally to cow call, hoping to lure in a bull moose eager to mate. When he saw movement in the willows, he paused. An animal revealed itself, but it wasn’t a bull moose. It was a caribou, a bull leading five other bulls and a small herd of cows. The Korths needed meat, and the prospects of getting a moose were getting slimmer every day, so Heimo snapped off four shots and dropped three of the bulls. He and Rhonda cut them up and then they walked back to get the canoe. They loaded the meat and paddled to the river. When they reached the river and got out of the canoe, Heimo was grateful that they were only two miles from the cabin. Three caribou made for a heavy load, and Heimo knew that lining the canoe wasn’t going to be easy.
Heimo and Rhonda were walking a gravel bar. Heimo struggled to keep the canoe’s bow out of the whirling eddies and tracking into the current. Suddenly the boat took off sideways and water spilled over the gunwales. Then the boat turned over, dumping everything—the caribou meat, Heimo’s rifle, his binoculars, a backpack. Heimo waded into the river to rescue what he could. The water was shockingly cold. He grabbed his backpack, turned and yelled for Rhonda to build a big fire. Ten minutes later, when Heimo returned to the gravel bar, having saved his gun and binoculars, his backpack, and, miraculously, much of the meat, too, Rhonda had the fire roaring.
“I love the isolation sometimes, but I miss talking with people my age,” Rhonda continues. “Ten and a half months is too long. I wish we could spend more time in town. I like being able to just walk down to the store. Everything here is hard. I’ll always live in Alaska, I think, but I don’t know if I’ll want to live out here,” she adds, and then interrupts herself to show me a bush of soapberries, which, she tells me, grizzlies are fond of. “I worry about this area though,” she says, picking up her train of thought. “I worry that one day they’ll discover oil or gold or something.” Krin chimes in and startles me. Sometimes getting Krin to talk is like prying information out of a hostile witness. “I like the peace and quiet,” she says, “but I miss my friends.” Krin confesses that she’d like to live somewhere else when she grows up—“Hawaii or Europe,” she says. Then, with coaxing from Rhonda, she tells me about the only real friend she’s ever had, a girl named Zane. It was the summer of 2000, and Heimo was commercial fishing. He was worried about Edna and the girls being in Fort Yukon alone, so instead they rented a cabin in Circle Hot Springs. Krin met Zane during her first week in Circle, and for nearly two months, the two of them were inseparable.
The girls are suddenly silent, as if each feels that she has said too much. We are walking along a side slough, and they run ahead of me. “This is where we had our bunny snares in winter,” Rhonda shouts back to me. Krin isn’t paying attention. She scales the riverbank and walks out into the tundra, where the snow has melted enough to reveal the vegetation underneath. “Low-bush cranberries,” she yells. Rhonda and I join her, and I eat the berries like a foraging grizzly. They are thawing now and are filled with sweetness. Krin has been watching me. “What’s the matter?” she says. “Haven’t you ever had cranberries in spring before?”
Rhonda and Krin walk ahead, leaving me with the berries. I graze for a few more minutes and then catch up to them, stopping briefly to inspect a willow bush and rub the soft rabbit fur of its young buds. Rhonda shouts to me, “On the way home, we’ll pick some of the leaves for a salad. They’re really tender.”
The girls have found the perfect south-facing cutbank. The snow is completely gone. “Daddy likes to get down on his hands and knees and smell the ground in spring,” Rhonda says, grabbing her pick and digging into the bank. Neither Rhonda nor Krin swings her pick with any force. Rather they hold their picks near the head and scratch at the dirt, digging gently like a woodcarver using a gouge to shape the features of a human face. Krin sets her pick aside and brushes away the dirt and roots to get at the main tuber of an Indian potato. She snaps it off. “Here,” she says, handing it to me. “Wash it off in the puddle.” I do as I’m instructed and then bite into it. It tastes starchy, like raw corn. “What do you think?” Rhonda asks, but doesn’t wait for my reply. “In fall we collect them in gunnysacks and set them outside to freeze. Then in winter, we’ll fry them up.”
Breakup is behind schedule, and even the geese have been slow to come. Heimo is puzzled. “I just can’t figure it out. We should be seeing flock after flock by now.”
Heimo and I are sitting in a makeshift driftwood goose blind, covered up to our waists in a white sheet, swatting at the first mosquitoes of the year. They’re fat, slow “bombers,” and they’re easy to exterminate. We have six decoys—four feeders and two sentinels—dug into the ice near the edge of the river channel. Though the advance of spring seems to have stalled, a five-foot-wide lead has formed in the middle of the river, where the ice has melted from the nearly constant sun. For the past two days the wind has come out of the north, bringing cold air out of the polar regions, and the temperature hasn’t climbed above the low forties. Heimo says he can feel it switching to the south though—good news. That will bring warm air. With twenty-one hours of full-on sun, it won’t take long for the snow and ice to melt, for this country to sprout new spring streams everywhere. Water will trickle and ooze out of every mountain, hill, and hump. If the wind does not shift, however, we could be locked in winter’s vise for another month. Earlier in the day Heimo and Edna were talking about the winter of 1992-1993, when the snow that fell on September 9 didn’t melt until early June 1993. “God,” Heimo said, “I hope that doesn’t happen this year. I love to spring out here, but I don’t want to be here until mid-June.”
The girls tell me that Heimo gets like this every year, a little irritable, they say, impatient to get to town. By mid-May, he is often just as eager as the girls are for a change of pace. This year he is more anxious than usual. He thinks it’s going to be a good year for muskrats, and he’s hoping to get out by the third week in May, so that he won’t miss the season. In late spring he and Fred Thomas go “ratting” together in the lakes around Fort Yukon; with .22s, they shoot muskrats for the meat, which Heimo likes fried, and for the skins, which bring an average of $2.50. Heimo is also thinking about the king salmon run. He and Fred set and tend fifty feet of gill net on the Yukon River once the run starts. But it isn’t just the ratting and the king salmon. Heimo likes to chum around with Fred, who, though he is nearly forty years older than Heimo, is still his best friend in town. Then there’s Heimo’s daily four-mile jog and his occasional indulgence—an ice-cold Coke from the Alaska Commercial Company store, which everyone calls the AC.
At this rate, however, unless the weather takes a dramatic turn, Heimo will surely miss the ratting season. As spring advances, things get tricky for the bush pilots. There’s usually a two-week period when a plane can’t get in or out, when there’s too little snow to land on skis and too much snow to land on wheels on the gravel bars.
Adding insult to injury, the annual spring migration of geese and ducks back to their Arctic nesting grounds is late, and this time of year the Korths depend on waterfowl for food.
Meat is an essential part of the bush diet. Though the Korths bring in provisions—black beans, peas, pinto beans, lentils, canned corn, green beans, spinach, rice, soups, spaghetti noodles, oatmeal, powdered milk, coffee, spices, butter, honey, sugar, and flour—these items are expensive, and the Korths buy only enough to supplement a main meal of meat, though Heimo does admit that their menu has grown more exotic over the years.
In spring when the temperature is consistently above thirty-two, the Korths cut up what’s left of their caribou for drymeat. Yesterday, Rhonda took the last hindquarter of caribou out of the small snow shelter that she had built to keep it fresh, and we made drymeat. It was a family project. Heimo cut the caribou into long, thin strips, following the grain of the meat, and then he put the strips into a bowl filled with salt water. Krin used her knife to sharpen the dry willow sticks, which served as skewers, handed them to me, and then I impaled the strips, fat end down. Rhonda dug a hole in the middle of the smoke rack and built a fire in the hole with dry cottonwood. Afterward, she joined me. The job took a full afternoon, but when we finished, the smoke rack held nearly seventy willow sticks, all dripping with five to six fresh caribou strips. Rhonda covered the rack with a plastic tarp, and Heimo reminded her that she’d need to tend the fire for the next two days. Rhonda shot him a look of disgust, as if to say, “Yeah, I know, Dad. I’ve only done this every spring since I was a little girl.”
Yesterday morning, Krin and Heimo each shot a goose, Krin’s first. They were the only two geese they saw all day. I helped Heimo pluck them. One was a good-sized Canada and the other was a speckle-belly. Both were “rolling in fat,” as Heimo likes to say. We saved the livers, gizzards, and hearts, which Edna fried up later while the geese were boiling. Heimo kept the wings, too. He’ll use them for bait once the trapping season begins. He is still upset with himself though. He and Krin had shot females. “I don’t like to shoot nesters,” he explained while we were plucking them. “Usually we’ll only take the males.”
In 1918, the United States and Canada enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prevents the hunting of waterfowl between March 10 and September 1. In doing so, Congress failed to adequately consider the fact that Alaskans who live in the bush often depend on waterfowl for their spring and summer meat. For years the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged with implementing the statute, turned a benevolent blind eye to this practice, choosing instead to enforce other aspects of the act. But now an amendment to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act allows for the spring harvest of waterfowl by rural residents, legalizing a hundred-year-old tradition.
Spring waterfowl hunting is a practice that doesn’t go unnoticed by urban waterfowl hunters who feel that they’re being shortchanged. Subsistence, in general, is a prickly issue in Alaska, pitting urban users against rural users, a controversy that often manifests itself as a Native/ non-Native divide. The Alaska Federation of Natives insists that a subsistence preference is needed to protect village lifestyles and economies, and it takes issue with Fairbanks hunters who regard taking a moose every fall as their inalienable right. Urban hunters retaliate, accusing Natives of shooting indiscriminately and not observing game laws. Plus, urban hunters are quick to point out that they have the Alaska state constitution on their side.
Tracking the history of the disagreement is messy. Alaska’s state constitution guarantees equal access for all residents to all natural resources; however, federal legislation awarded rural residents priority use of fish and game. So a conflict was born between federal law, which guarantees a “rural priority,” and the state constitution. After twenty-plus years of controversy, the federal government prevailed and since 1990 has managed wildlife on all federal lands in Alaska.
Back at the goose blind, it is late afternoon when we finally abandon our hunt. The day has been a bust except for the brief visit of an immature rough-legged hawk, which displayed an interest in our decoys and the sound of a ruby-crowned kinglet singing in the distance. Heimo was almost beside himself with joy when he heard that. He closed his eyes as if listening to Enya. “Such a little bird with such a big song.”
We slosh through the overflow in our hip boots like two little boys, splashing and running, but by the time we reach the river’s main channel, Heimo is serious. “We’ll have to be careful here. This time of year, the ice changes every second.” We walk tentatively. Weak ice spells danger, so we avoid the telltale gray spots. “Look for the dark blue ice; that’s the best,” Heimo says, as I try to ignore the strange, unnerving moan of the ice under my feet.
Edna, Krin, and Rhonda are waiting for us on the riverbank. “Nothing today, huh,” Edna says. “Nothing,” Heimo replies. “Not a thing.”
It has been decided; we will leave this weekend, Saturday, May 18, or Sunday, depending upon the weather. Yesterday a plane flew over. The pilot, it turned out, was a friend of the Korths. Months before, Heimo had made arrangements with him to pick us up, and he was flying over, scouting, checking on the weather conditions and the gravel bars. Using the handheld aircraft radio, Heimo talked with him and asked how things looked from the air. The pilot advised him to get out before the melting started and the river rose. If that happened, he said, we’d be on the river for at least another two to three weeks. That was all Heimo needed to hear. The two of them discussed a date and time, and Heimo said that we’d be ready.
When I got the news that we’d be leaving early, I wasn’t disappointed. The prospect of springing out and not getting off the river until early to mid June, wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I had a family to go home to, my wife was six months pregnant with our second child, and I had already been gone for a long time. She needed my help, and my daughter missed her daddy.
“Springing out” has been the final act in a yearly cycle repeated thousands of times over the last one hundred years, a tradition that is kept alive by the few remaining families that still call the Alaskan wilderness their home. For the Korths it means the end of nearly a year of hunting, trapping, cutting and splitting wood, cooking on a woodstove, sewing and patching clothes, schoolwork, hauling ice and water, and doing the dishes.
For the last two weeks, they’ve been wondering: When will breakup come? When will we get off the river? Everyone has been looking forward to town. But now that the date is set, there is much work to be done—too much. The snowmachines have to be put away on three-foot-high platforms in case of flooding. But first Heimo has to run all the gas out of the tanks and carburetors and take out the spark plugs and put two-cycle oil in the cylinders. The house has to be cleaned and packed up, too. Clothes, boots, parkas, guns, ammunition, food, pots and pans need to be stored in the cache or in sealed 55-gallon drums. Finally, Heimo has to varmint- and grizzly-proof the cabin, screwing the door shut and boarding up the windows.
Edna grabs a box and starts putting clothes in it.
The girls roll their eyes and grumble, “Not yet, Mom.”
Heimo pulls on his boots and starts to lace them up. “Forget the work,” he mumbles. “How about some hockey?”
“No way,” Edna answers. “We got lots of work to do.”
“C’mon, Mom,” Heimo says, “we can start tomorrow.”
Edna continues packing clothes into the box, then she looks at Heimo and smiles as if she is up to no good. Rhonda and Krin are already running for the river.
Ten minutes later all five of us are on the ice, ready to play our favorite game—hockey, played in boots instead of on skates—for what will be the last time this year. The ice is dark blue and as smooth as a pane of glass, but the warm-up that Heimo felt when we were hunting is now a reality. The wind is out of the south; the temperature is pushing the high 40s. By tomorrow night the river ice will be full of slush, splattered with small ponds of water and very dangerous.
Rhonda sets the puck—a round plug of cottonwood coated in ice—between Heimo and me, and we simulate a ferocious hockey face-off, using our boots as sticks. Heimo pushes me to win the puck and is advancing toward our goal unimpeded until I catch him, tripping him with a hook slide. While he’s down I jump on him, giving Rhonda just enough time to steal the puck. “So you’re going to play that way, eh?” Krin says, making a beeline for Rhonda. I give Heimo one last push before I rush down the ice, moving my arms and legs as if I am cross-country skiing. Rhonda and Krin are battling for the puck. I slide in and take it away. Rushing toward Edna, I am dribbling the puck, struggling not to lose it, while still trying to escape Heimo, who is gaining on me. Edna crouches down in front of the goal. She has no intention of letting me score. Ten feet away, I decide to take it all the way in instead of stopping and shooting. Suddenly Krin catches me blindside with an NFL hit and sends me flying in the air toward Edna. I hit Edna at the ankles with an inadvertent cross-body block. Edna falls over me and then upends Heimo, who has been chasing the play. Krin jumps on Heimo, and Rhonda flops onto Krin. It’s one big pileup, and we are all laughing too hard to even think about moving. Then Heimo hears something. “Shhh,” he says, as a small flock of Canada geese flies overhead. “Shhh.” Heimo points his index finger to the blue sky. “Blam,” he says. “Blam.”